Sunday press review
Rail strikes + Bitcoin + Were The Beatles lucky?
Afternoon everyone, hope you are enjoying the weekend. Happy Father’s Day to all the dads among my subscribers. I am looking forward to finishing off the day with a beer and the last round of the US Open, which is beautifully poised going into the final day and could see a British winner...
Here is my quick run-through of what I think is interesting in the Sunday papers today and what I think will be followed up in the days ahead…
The rail strikes are going to dominate the news agenda this week, with travel seriously disrupted and many people in towns and cities working from home rather than the office. Unsurprisingly, The Mail on Sunday, The Sunday Telegraph and The Observer lead on the story. The Mail splashes on “Starmer does support the rail strikers” (story here) while The Telegraph leads with “Unions ‘bribing’ workers to strike” (story here), which includes Kwasi Kwarteng, the business secretary, accusing trade unions of plotting a summer of chaos. We can expect more trade union versus government stories over the next few days and a look at which other sectors may be hit by strikes. The Observer says that teachers and the NHS could be next. One quick note on the rail strikes, way fewer people get the train to work than you might think, so this is a story about office workers in cities mainly. Official government statistics show that pre-Covid just 11 per cent of people got the train to work, compared to 68 per cent by car. In London, however, just 27 per cent use a car. Post-Covid I think the numbers getting the train will be even lower. The government statistics on this are here.
Sticking with The Mail on Sunday, this headline is eye-catching, to say the least: “WHO chief ‘believes Covid did leak from Wuhan lab’.” It’s a story by political editor Glen Owen which says the head of the World Health Organisation, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, told a “senior European politician” that the most likely explanation for how the Covid-19 pandemic started is that the virus leaked out a Chinese laboratory. Story here.
The Mail on Sunday has stepped up its “Spike the hike campaign” to cut taxes by running a story in which a collection of business leaders call for the government to scrap the planned increase in corporation tax next year. The people quoted include Sir Rocco Forte, Sir Paul Marshall, Tim Martin, Sir Martin Sorrell and Sir Philip Hampton. Corporation tax is due to increase from 19 per cent to 25 per cent next April. Doing this during an economic slowdown is not ideal, to put it mildly. However, it would be politically incomprehensible for the government to scrap this when it has gone ahead with the increase in national insurance. Instead, we should expect to hear more from Rishi Sunak about other ways he will encourage business investment, such as a permanent superdeduction which offers tax breaks when you invest in modernising your business. The Mail story is here.
A problem for the Issa brothers and Asda? Asda’s bonds are trading at a discount of almost a fifth to the price at which they were issued according to this Mail on Sunday story. Asda has about £3.7 billion of debt following the Issa brothers’ takeover in 2020.
Two remarkable photos in the Sunday papers. The president of the United States falling off his bike and baggage chaos at Heathrow leading to luggage piling up. President Biden story here and Heathrow here.
Equinor, the Norwegian state-owned energy company, is threatening to walk away from a £4.5 billion North Sea oil and gas project near the Shetland Islands due to the government’s windfall tax, The Sunday Telegraph reports. An interesting line in this story is that Kwasi Kwarteng, the business secretary, appears to have upped his opposition to the windfall tax by writing to Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, to express his concerns about the potential hit to investment and lack of consultation with the industry. Is this useful PR for a government that wants to demonstrate it is instinctively against tax rises? Or something more significant?
MPs on the Hong Kong all-party parliamentary group want Wimbledon to scrap its sponsorship deal with HSBC. Story here.
The “magic circle” law firm Slaughter and May is going to allow staff to bring their dog to the office for a day. It’s a trial that could be made permanent if successful. Don’t worry though, dogs won’t be allowed in the canteen or meeting rooms. Sunday Telegraph story here.
Lots of coverage in the Sunday papers of bitcoin’s bad day yesterday, which saw the cryptocurrency fall below $20,000 for the first time in more than 18 months. The Sunday Times leads its business section on the story and also runs an analysis from San Francisco-based Danny Fortson on some of the characters behind the crypto industry. The news story is here and the analysis here.
Interesting analysis of why there is a shortage of PlayStation 5’s in The Sunday Times. Lots of factors at play. You can read the piece here.
One final thing, I loved this Sunday Times piece that asks whether The Beatles got lucky with their success. It’s based on an interview with Cass Sunstein, a Harvard scholar and adviser to Barack Obama when he was president, who has written a paper on the topic for the University of Liverpool’s The Journal of Beatles Studies. This isn’t just some “the Beatles were actually bad” take by a Rolling Stones fan. Sunstein describes himself as a Beatles superfan. However, he is also a behavioural psychologist who is fascinated by cultural history. His question is basically this: were the Beatles so good that they would always have been that successful or did a collection of factors, some fortuitous, help push them to the top? It’s a fascinating look at the role of luck in history and how we often look back on events or trends from the past as inevitable when in fact they were never preordained. This is the sort of discussion we will be having in Off to Lunch’s Business Studies podcast, which will take a second look at big business stories from the past. More news on the launch of the podcast soon…Anyway, the article is here.
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Graham